A horrified animal control officer spotted a dog riding in a crate attached to the outside of a vehicle on I-95 last weekend.

Nicole Hubbard said she was traveling through Georgia on her way home to South Carolina with her boyfriend when they spotted a dog in a small airline crate attached to the rear bumper of a Dodge Durango.

“We thought, ‘Surely, they don’t have a dog in the back of it,’” Hubbard told the New York Daily News. “But when we got up next to it, there the dog was.”

So she snapped a photo and called state highway patrol who said an officer would be dispatched. But no one came. Hubbard said the dispatcher told her they had no officer to send.

She said her temperature gauge read 94 degrees at the time.

The intrepid couple, heading home from a Florida vacation, followed the vehicle for two hours until it crossed the South Carolina line and called state police there.

An operator kept Hubbard on the line until a highway cop was dispatched to respond to the call.

Hubbard said locking the dog in the crate near the SUV’s exhaust pipe, without any water on a hot day was unacceptable.

“I was just amazed that somebody could be that uneducated of the dangers with that dog being there,” she said. “Hopefully, they learned something from it.”

Hopefully the people in that vehicle did not get their dog transporting advice from former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

Romney took heat through the entire campaign, including in dozens of columns by New York Times columnist Gail Collins, for having once strapped his dog Seamus in a crate to the top of the family station wagon for a 12-hour trip to Canada.

Revelations about that incident sparked a "Dogs Against Romney" website, parody books, jokes on late night TV and generated protests from animal lovers across the nation.

News reports indicate it was not determined if police cited the Durango driver. That wasn't the case in Colorado in 2012 where a Romney protestor was stopped for carting a dog in a crate atop a car.